As many newspaper businesses evolve towards a digital future, Highland News & Media looked to take a long term view of their publishing model. The ultimate goal of this decision was to aim for a sustainable and viable digital business model that would future proof the business.

Knowing that print advertising was more at risk due to shifts in the industry, they embraced a digital subscription model. This meant focusing their strategy on increasing the share of revenue that comes directly from their online content.

With limited digital capabilities to sell content online and without having an in-house tech team, it was challenging to reach a goal where online content made up the vast majority of revenue. All of their content as of yet was open-access, meaning they were missing out on the opportunity to collect valuable first-party data and build a subscriber base.

Launching a business project that centered around regular subscriber revenue required a platform that allowed Highland News & Media to track the quality of their page views, provide a personalized user experience for every reader, and encourage engaged readers to pay for content.

Being a small team, Highland News & Media needed to employ a flexible solution that didn’t need tech expertise to manage. They didn’t have an inhouse technical expert and wanted to avoid relying on hiring one to update the system, as this could have caused a point of failure for the business.

“The simplicity of operating [Zephr], and the fact you don’t need to be a tech expert to use it were clear factors when choosing Zephr as a platform.” — Steve Barron, Publishing Director

With the help of Zephr’s intuitive platform, Highland News & Media were able to develop a subscription strategy based around asking their most engaged readers to pay for digital content. The solution was to implement a metered paywall across their platforms that could be operated and managed without much tech expertise, and could be altered quickly if new strategic direction required a change.

“Ultimately [Zephr] gave us a simple solution to applying a metered paywall. Now, if we make a decision in the business, we can change [the paywall] and flex within minutes.” — Steve Barron, Publishing Director

Implementing paywalls across both their websites and app enabled them to collect data from multiple devices and build a more complete picture of conversion activity, ready for optimization and testing.

“One of the challenges in our business was understanding data, where to get it and how to analyze it. [Thanks to Zephr] we’re getting better at that and we’re constantly testing and making changes to what we’re doing and trying out different strategies.” — Steve Barron, Publishing Director

Testing their pricing strategy with Zephr’s Rules Builder allowed them to optimize and alter their paywalls depending on shifts in business objectives or changes they saw in user behavior.

Overall, the paywall implementation took six months to go live. From that point, Highland News & Media broke even on their investment for the project after just four months. They’re off to a great start and are acquiring subscribers and registered users at a much quicker rate than expected. In the future, Highland News & Media will be aiming to gain an even better understanding of the user data they collect, using Zephr to hyper personalize their content and focus their marketing efforts on readers with the highest propensity to subscribe.